20 beauty fails we all made as teenagers

Your teenage years are prime time for experimentation, whether that's with new phases (hey, we all had an emo period) or with new hobbies (the Cosmo office has more ex-gymnasts/cello players/volleyball captains than we can count).

But if there was one thing we were really curious to try out as teenagers? It was makeup. It all seemed so new, and shiny and exciting - but before the days of beauty bloggers and YouTube tutorials, it was essentially the blind leading the blind out there.

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If you were lucky, you might have had an older sister or cool mum who showed you how to apply mascara - if not, you really just had to run into Superdrug and hope for the best.

Anyone remember some of these makeup stages?

1. Foundation that was too light

Shade-matching is HARD, kay? And again - before swatches on Instagram and what have you, and given that your local shop had zero testers because people always nicked them, you really had to just make a guess. And then look like Casper the Ghost.

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2. Foundation that was too dark

Ah yes, the flipside to the whole not-being-able-to-shade-match was getting a very dark foundation that resembled gone-off Fanta. Attractive.

3. Foundation on your lips

Of course, we all get foundation on our lips when we're applying our face in the morning, but now we diligently wipe it off before we leave the house. For some reason, chalked-up lips were all the rage in our adolescent years. No idea why. Moving on to...

4. Clear lip gloss

Oh yeah, if you were really cool, you would finish off that matte, foundation-covered pout with a healthy slick of clear lip gloss. Oh yeah. Why, why did we do this?!

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5. Clear mascara

Sorry, to any fans of clear mascara out there (do they even still make this? Or did production cease when we ambled into our late teens?) but it literally did NOTHING. It made no difference, apart from making your lashes feel really heavy, but boy, we loved that stuff.

6. 'Smudgy' eyeliner

We weren't so fussed with perfect gradient smokey eyes and cut creases as teens. And why should we have been, when cheap kohl pencils existed? With those beauties, you could line your whole eye and smudge it all the way up to yours brows in seconds. Genius.

7. OTT bronzer

Say you managed to get the right shade of foundation. Well, you wouldn't be the right colour for long, because along came bronzer. The more the merrier! While you're at it, why don't your give your shirt collar a good dust too?

8. OTT blusher

Bronzer's best pal? Blusher, and lots of it. The look we were all going for, apparently, was a combined terrifying china doll and Victorian lady. Basically, we wore a lot of the stuff.

9. Body glitter EVERYWHERE

Apart from straight up body glitter (which our mums invariably hated because it ruined the towels), we just seemed to always choose the shimmery-ist bronzers and blushers we could find.

10. ALL THE COLOURS

Around your birthday or Christmas, a Cool Aunt would probably buy you a makeup palette with about 25 different shades in. But unlike our beloved Urban Decay Naked palettes, the shades would not correspond with one another, and would likely be very, very bright colours. We would take this as a challenge and wear all of them.

11. The worst eyebrows

We committed so many eyebrow sins in adolescence. Shaving lines in them, over-plucking them, waxing them to oblivion... we were basically hell-bent on destroying our God-given eyebrows, Kill Bill style.

12. Crazy layers

Was it the popularity of 'The Rachel', or was it the advent of Girls Aloud? Either way, having your hair cut into the SHORTEST layers imaginable (bonus points for a micro fringe) was all the rage.

13. Flicky hair

Once you had your tiny layers cut it, you couldn't let those bad boys lie flat. Oh no, you had to go in with your straighteners and flick those bad boys out to almost 90 degree perpendicular perfection. Oh yeah.

14. Crimped hair

Of course, if you were going on a hot date to Pizza Hut, you had to pull out all the stops. The only for the occasion was mad crazy crimping - accessorised with a handful of jazzy kirby clips, natch.

15. The multi-coloured manicure

We sure were indecisive as teens. Picking just one shade for our nails was hard - so we would wear just wear a different colour on every finger instead, duh.

16. Bright braces

Getting your train tracks fitted was a teenage rite of passage. Sure, you could have subtle clear links, but why, when you could have bright blue or red? So much cooler.

17. Hair mascara

You weren't allowed to dye your hair (mums just don't get it), so you had to go for the next best thing - badger-like neon stripes glommed through your hair with gloopy mascara that glued your strands together. Fashion.

18. Having a three-step skincare regime

Face wipe, face wipe, face wipe. Who needed fancy cleanser when you had these thin, slightly sting-inducing bits of fabric? A red raw face before bed was de rigeur.

19. Wrecking your hair with a combination of Sun-In and lemon juice

Any 'highlighter' you could find, you were using - so your mum wouldn't pay for you to have a full head of foils, but who needed that when you had your DIY remedies?

20. Peeling off your nail polish

Okay, some of us still do this, but there was an inner masochist in our teenage selves that just wanted to watch the world burn, and so we would peel off the nail varnish we so painstakingly applied. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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